About

Round-the-world Circumnavigation

“We never left the Mediterranean intending to sail around the world. It’s something that just evolved along the way. From Cyprus we had two choices… either northeast to Syria or south to Egypt but the winds that day favoured sailing south. Once through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea the adventure just opened up; we continued southwards from Egypt to Sudan and to Eritrea, stayed a while in those fascinating countries and then got blown further south to Yemen by a bad storm. Our enforced six month stopover there in Aden making sail repairs, finally turned both of us into intrepid adventurers as well as seasoned sailors… so we decided to continue around-the-world onboard our sometimes temperamental sailing boat Sänna just to see what would happen…” Dave

Never Turn Back

Our circumnavigation eastwards has been exceptionally rewarding, an extreme test of both our personal strength and character. Sometimes, it’s been far from easy whilst other times it has been an indescribable adventure. We’ve experiencing things we sall never forget, memories that will forever be precious in our minds. We have weathered ferocious storms in the Red Sea, in the Indian Ocean and the north Pacific, we lived amongst the pirates in Aden and were held captive at gunpoint by the Yemen army. We found the floating body of a Chinese fisherman in the sea five hundred miles from land between Australia and New Zealand and have been attacked by grizzly bears in Alaska. There are too many treasured memories to describe in such short paragraphs.

All of these experiences rank alongside some of the most incredible friendships we ever thought possible, friends we’ve made along the way both with local people living within their own cultures and with other long-distance sailors. We’ve seen parts of the world few tourists visit… always making our way entirely under our own endeavours. Our website here is a record of our voyage which, at this time of writing, is now of nine years duration. Both of us are not sure how long this is going to last or if we’ll ever complete our circumnavigation back to England and the Mediterranean… it’s not that important to us anymore because nowadays we’re not on a mission. We lost that kind of incentive long ago and it’s now a lifestyle choice, one which sometimes puts us in conflict with the real world. Perhaps we somehow turned native somewhere along the way.

We’ll continue to sail our way eastwards until something unexpected happens… maybe someday we’ll find the perfect location to put down roots and stay a while. But we have learned one important life-skill along the way, something vital in understanding how life can change forever. Never ever turn back.